“Responsibly all-in.”
“I like the orange coin. A lot.”
My research and audience straddles the macro finance world and the bitcoin world. And so humorously, I get heat from both sides.
“Lyn, I love your macro work but you’re too obsessed with bitcoin; I wish you would focus less on that stuff.” -hedge fund reader.
Vs
“Lyn, since you’re a fellow bitcoiner, why do you only have a 5-10% allocation to bitcoin in your public model portfolios!? Shouldn’t you sell all your stocks and buy more?” -fellow pleb.
I talk to many institutions, as well as high net worth individuals, and medium net worth individuals like engineers and doctors. This is where individual situations come into play. I had been watching bitcoin for a while, publicly wrote about it near the top of the cycle in 2017 and (correctly) passed on it from that point, but then kept watching it during the bear market and then hardcore jumped into it during the March/April 2020 crash starting at $6,900/coin as a long-term bull, and haven’t wavered since.
For example, 2.5 years later as Bitcoin crashed amid the FTX fallout in November 2022 from 69k to sub-16k, I was at Pacific Bitcoin laughing about it. I was not uncertain.
In those initial months of 2020, I put every dollar of my liquid capital into bitcoin. I didn’t sell my existing stocks and trigger capital gains tax, didn’t withdraw from my IRA or 401(k), but otherwise most of my existing liquid cash and all of my incoming earned cash went into bitcoin. I threw like a quarter of my net worth into it. And it paid off. For me as a conservative investor, that was my version of “all-in”. I wasn’t fucking around. I never go all-in like that, but I did it for bitcoin.
I grew up poor, and then worked for 12 years in engineering and engineering management. There is no world where I would invest in such a way that there was even a 1% chance that I could be wrong and lose my entire net worth and the past 12 years of my work at that point. I would never be 100% invested unless I consider it to be risk-free, and I consider nothing to be risk-free, and so I diversify by default. I am conservative as a baseline, but opportunistic when appropriate. I put at most 5% into any one stock, but I threw 25% into bitcoin as an anomaly due to how bullish I was. My husband was like, “what are we doing?” and I was like, “trust me, here’s why”.
And then, there are eight family members and associates who, if I were to go broke, would have to radically diminish and change their lifestyles. Their housing support and their everyday income comes significantly from my earnings. It’s like running a small business. So, when I see people on social media be like, “wHy DoN’t YoU gO aLl iN?” I’m thinking like, “Bitch, I’ve gone about as all-in on this new distributed ledger as I can while still sustaining a reasonable level of lower volatility equity and other assets for tangible income and fallback support for eight people”. And then I realize the anon who wrote that is probably a single dude in his parents’ basement, and my response is unwarranted. Don’t let anons on social media affect you.
For example, our extended family ran into a liquidity issue and had to change households this year, and we got a good real estate deal but it was based on me having six figures in liquidity to just throw around at short notice, which meant having maintained adequate diversification for that possibility, which I was anticipating.
In my model portfolios, I began to recommend a 5% bitcoin allocation in early 2020, and then I took some chips off the table in 2021 near the highs after a 3x and 5x gain as Musk was pumping Dogecoin, to rebalance back down to that 5% target. Why? Because not everybody has put a thousand hours of research into it and can realistically put a quarter of their liquid net worth into it. My point was, “your portfolio has zero bitcoin, you should probably have at least 5% bitcoin, and better yet, you should buy bitcoin non-custodially at whatever size is appropriate for you. As it soars, rebalance. As it falls, buy back in.” That rebalancing worked well for my public portfolio. I warned of exuberance, leaned into fear, despite not trying to predict any short-term price action.
And during 2022, amid the bear market, I joined the formation of Ego Death Capital, a bitcoin-only VC firm, as a founding advisor. And more recently, I’m leaning more into that role, and some announcements regarding that are incoming in terms of my deeper involvement. In other words, while bitcoin price action was in a period of weakness, I was happily ready to lean in to it with my capital, my time, and my reputation, to fund bitcoin companies that were developing cool stuff. https://egodeath.capital/portfolio
And then there was my husband’s wisdom. He edits all of my research reports, among other work that he does. And he has better wisdom than me overall. One day in early 2023 amid the bear market out of the blue after hardly ever talking about bitcoin he was like, “How many bitcoins do we have?” I said the number X but also explained that I am buying more lately. He said, “Alright, good, let’s get to Y soon. I know you are super cautious, and I love that, but don’t mess around on this. Buy more. Push harder. I know you have extra pockets of liquidity above the baseline. Use them.” By Y, I mean he gave me an aggressive number that was a bit above what I would have otherwise done in that timeframe.
I was like, “Okay I’ll try. But I mean, we need certain liquidity.” And he said, “I’ve edited your research reports for years. I’ve never seen you more convicted on something. Don’t fuck around on this. Lean into it. We will figure out liquidity if need be. You said to trust you in early 2020 when you initially bought it. Trust me here in 2023 when I say to buy extra vs whatever you’re buying. I can read you better than you can read yourself, and the answer is to buy. You’re being too conservative.” I followed his advice, at like sub-$20k and sub-$25k.
And then later this year, within the past few months, we indeed balanced it very tightly; I had bought as many bitcoin for us as we could early in the year and I barely hit the target he set since I was being cautious, and then we ran into a surprise liquidity requirement (changing households in Egypt) and needed to throw capital at a new place as a down payment for our family for seven people, and I was like, “This is why I maintained so much liquidity, btw. We have it because I saw this type of thing coming!” And he was like, “But we have it, right?” I and I was like, “Yes, barely at such short notice!” And he was like, “So we have the exact amount then, fucking nailed it!” The yin-and-yang worked well.
The point is, I’m as all-in on bitcoin as I get with any asset. Which means to say, I am ready to survive its failure or repression in long bear markets without selling any, but I am also highly engaged and invested in its success. I never go all-in on anything, but I’ve never leaned into any asset as thoroughly as I have done on bitcoin since April 2020. It’s the maximum I lean into any asset while still maintaining financial prudence. When it falls 80%, it doesn’t affect my lifestyle or force me to sell. When it soars, I am cautious, and focus on how to best improve the success of the network.
Good evening. Let's accelerate.
